A Witch by Any Other Name

 One of the earliest books I remember holding was a book about tarot cards. I was too young to make much sense of the words, but the pictures were another matter.

There were kings and queens, strange creatures, figures suspended between heaven and earth, and people standing at the edges of things I did not yet understand. I remember studying those images with the peculiar seriousness children sometimes bring to subjects adults consider beyond them. I had no understanding of divination, occult philosophy, or the elaborate systems of meaning concealed within the cards. I only knew that something about them fascinated me.

My mother had an interest in such things herself. For a time, she explored witchcraft and the occult, and although her involvement eventually diminished, she never discouraged mine. She bought me my first Ouija board. She allowed me to read about spells, spirits, and the curious possibilities of an enchanted world. I collected ingredients, imagined workings of my own, and searched the shelves of our public library for whatever I could find.

There was something forbidden about it, certainly. Even as a boy, I understood that respectable people were not supposed to be terribly interested in such things. But the prohibition came largely from the world beyond our home. My mother never taught me to be ashamed of my curiosity.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder whether I have always been a witch.

Although even writing that sentence gives me pause.

At sixteen, I experienced a religious conversion in a fundamentalist Christian church. It was sincere, as such experiences often are, and I embraced my new faith with considerable enthusiasm. I eventually found myself giving testimony about having been delivered from witchcraft.

There is a certain comedy in remembering this now.

During a family vacation, after my supposed deliverance, we visited a bookstore in a large city. I came away with two books on witchcraft, both concerned with the older, earthier practices of folk magic. Apparently, whatever had been delivered from me had neglected to take my curiosity with it.

I did not consider the contradiction particularly amusing at the time. I was trying to be faithful to a religion that had given me a compelling understanding of the world, and I knew that my fascination with magic did not fit comfortably within it. Yet the interest persisted. It survived my conversion, my religious commitments, and the various attempts I made to arrange my spiritual life into something coherent and acceptable.

Years later, after serving on the mission field, I was brought home and expelled from my church because I was gay.

There are many things I could write about that experience, and perhaps someday I will. For now, it is enough to say that the institution to which I had given so much of myself no longer had a place for me.

In the years that followed, I returned to my earlier interests with a surprising sense of familiarity. I began exploring witchcraft again, particularly Wicca and the Reclaiming tradition. There was much I found beautiful in these approaches, and much that spoke to something I had carried since childhood. Yet I never quite found myself at home within their religious frameworks. Goddess spirituality, the invocation of various deities, and the theological structures surrounding them were not things I could fully embrace.

I admired what others found there. I simply could not pretend to share all of it.

During my twenties, I also had experiences involving spirits that remain among the most extraordinary events of my life. I saw things. I heard things. There were occasions when I experienced spirits speaking to me and through me. These were not vague impressions or pleasant sensations that I later decided to interpret spiritually. They were concrete experiences, vivid enough that I remember them decades later.

I know such claims invite skepticism. I have no particular interest in persuading anyone to accept my interpretation of them. I can only say that they happened as I experienced them, and that they permanently altered my understanding of what might be possible.

I have not experienced anything quite like them since.

Over the years, my spiritual life has wandered through more traditions than I could comfortably explain at a dinner party. I have been drawn to the discipline of monastic life, the beauty of Christian liturgy, the stillness of meditation, and the contemplative wisdom of several religious paths. Some of those journeys were deeply meaningful. Others ended painfully. All of them left something behind.

Through it all, my interest in witchery remained.

I use that word deliberately.

These days, my practice is a rather personal mixture of folk witchery, hearth magic, and the green traditions associated with plants, herbs, and the natural world. I have a small garden in my backyard that I call my chaos garden, an affectionate name for a collection of herbs, flowers, and other growing things that do not always appear particularly concerned with my intentions for them.

I read cards every day. Although I own and appreciate tarot and oracle decks, I most often use ordinary playing cards. There is something deeply satisfying about finding divination in an object so familiar, something that might otherwise be brought out for a game around the kitchen table.

I carry stones that I have charged for particular spiritual purposes. I wear a ring made from wood chosen for its magical associations. Certain oils accompany me throughout the day, worked into my clothing, my hair, and the ordinary rituals of washing and dressing. Fragrance, music, cooking, and the tending of my home all have places within my practice.

Much of this would be unremarkable to anyone watching.

I get up, get dressed, go to work, read books, tend my garden, and attend to the ordinary obligations of being alive. I am an introvert, a rather enthusiastic reader, and a man whose daily existence would probably disappoint anyone expecting dramatic displays of occult power.

I have no desire to appear mysterious.

My family knows about my practice. My partner knows. Neither finds it particularly surprising. At work, I suspect some colleagues regard me as a little eccentric, perhaps inclined toward New Age spirituality, though I do not advertise the extent of my involvement in witchery.

I see no reason to do so.

There is a difference between secrecy and privacy, and I have come to appreciate the latter.

Still, there is a question that has followed me for years, one that seems almost embarrassingly simple.

What does a man like me call himself?

The obvious answer is witch.

I know perfectly well that men can be witches. I know that men have practiced magic throughout history, sometimes openly and sometimes under considerable threat. I know that the historical record is more complicated than the popular stories we tell about witchcraft and persecution.

Yet knowing these things does not entirely resolve my discomfort.

Much of contemporary witchcraft culture speaks about the witch as an intrinsically female figure. There are declarations that all women are witches, celebrations of witchcraft as an expression of womanhood, and frequent retellings of the witch trials as though those accused and executed had been exclusively women.

I understand why the witch has become such a powerful symbol within feminism. There are histories of oppression, resistance, and reclamation that deserve serious attention. I have no wish to diminish them. Women have every right to find strength in a figure once used to frighten, shame, and silence them.

But I sometimes wonder where that leaves the rest of us.

When the witch is presented as inseparable from womanhood, I feel a small but unmistakable sense of loss.

It is an odd feeling, to be alienated from a word describing something so intimately familiar.

I have practiced forms of witchery since childhood. I have spent decades reading, questioning, experimenting, abandoning certain beliefs, and returning to others. My magical life has survived religious conversion, institutional rejection, intellectual doubt, and the ordinary changes that accompany growing older.

Yet I hesitate to call myself a witch.

There are alternatives, of course.

Warlock has its defenders, but it carries associations that do not particularly appeal to me. Sorcerer suggests a different sort of magical practice, something grander and perhaps more commanding than my own. Magician is historically respectable, though in ordinary conversation it is liable to conjure images of playing cards disappearing up sleeves, which is not quite what I have in mind when I say I read them.

I have recently become interested in the historical cunning folk of England, men and women who practiced forms of folk magic involving charms, divination, healing, and protection. There may be something in that history worth exploring. I am not yet familiar enough with it to claim the name.

And I am increasingly reluctant to adopt a title merely because one happens to be available.

What troubles me is not that the English language lacks words for men who practice magic. It has plenty. What troubles me is that none of them seems to carry quite the same intimacy, the same earthiness, the same sense of ordinary enchantment that I hear in the word witch.

I do not want a grander title.

I want a word that could belong to a man with herbs growing behind his house, a worn deck of playing cards on his table, and a quiet conviction that the world contains more than our usual explanations allow.

A man who takes magic seriously without taking himself too seriously.

A man who has no wish to make his spirituality into a spectacle.

Perhaps this is why I have become more comfortable saying that I practice witchery.

The word feels old without being antiquated, intimate without being precious. It describes what I do without insisting upon a particular theology or requiring me to adopt an identity that still feels slightly foreign.

I know that other men have made their peace with the word witch. Some embrace it proudly, and I am glad they do. I have no desire to argue them out of it. Their ease with the name may even help create a little more room for men like me.

I also know that the discomfort I feel is not the whole story. Witchcraft is not a single tradition with a universally agreed-upon vocabulary. Its histories are tangled, its practices varied, and its contemporary communities far less uniform than their most visible voices sometimes suggest.

Nevertheless, words matter.

They shape the boundaries of belonging, sometimes without anyone intending to exclude. A phrase meant to celebrate one group can leave another standing quietly at the edge of the conversation, uncertain whether the invitation extends to them.

I would like other men who practice witchery to know that there is room for them, even when the language surrounding the practice makes that room difficult to see. I would like us to be able to acknowledge that discomfort without turning it into a quarrel over who has suffered more, who arrived first, or who possesses the greater claim to a name.

I suspect there are more of us than we realize.

Men who tend gardens and keep charms. Men who consult cards, work with herbs, speak to spirits, or attend to the turning of the seasons with a sense of reverence. Men whose magical lives are neither theatrical nor particularly interested in being noticed.

Some call themselves witches. Others have found different names. Some, like me, are still considering the matter.

Meanwhile, the practice continues.

Tomorrow morning, I will turn over my cards. I will choose the oils I wear, put on my wooden ring, and go about the business of an ordinary day. At some point, I may step outside to see what is happening in the chaos garden. There will be books waiting to be read and the usual domestic matters requiring attention.

None of these things will settle the question of what I ought to call myself.

For now, I am a man who practices witchery.

It is a slightly cumbersome description, I admit. But it is mine, and it is true.

I have lived with magic for most of my life. I would simply like to find a name that feels as much at home with me as magic always has.